THE WOMAN LOGAN knew as Claire and Marco knew as Jill—and whom other people have known by other names—walks through Union Station in Los Angeles. Orange light from the setting sun pours in through the big windows. She walks in tight jeans and tall heels, with a black leather jacket cinched around her body and a Louis Vuitton handbag slung over her shoulder. Her luxuriant golden hair bounces around her shoulders as she struts over the marble floors.

A group of college-aged boys turn their heads and watch her. A tired-looking woman with two kids in a double-stroller eyes her. A middle-aged man in a Lakers sweatshirt does a double-take as she walks by.

The woman settles into a seat to wait for her train. She can feel the eyes on her—jealous eyes, lustful eyes—and she loves the feeling. She is on top of the world. She’s rich. She’s confident. And, after a week, she’s still feeling quite elated about how things went down at Lake Aloha. It couldn’t have worked out better.

She’d fooled Logan from the start. He’d never suspected a thing until she’d put a bullet into him. And Marco, the thug who’d brought her in? She didn’t even have to double-cross him. Logan took him out for her.

The only inconvenience was that she had to pick the diamonds up off the ground. She’s certain she left some behind, but it couldn’t be helped. She didn’t have a lot of time. She needed to get back to Logan’s house and wipe down anything that might have her fingerprints or DNA on it.

She knows she did a half-assed job, but that bitch from the newspaper showing up had made her antsy to get out of town.

It didn’t matter. The police would search Logan’s house once they found his body on that island, but they wouldn’t look too hard. The evidence at Lake Aloha would tell a pretty clear story: three crooks had a dispute and killed each other.

Yes, the whole thing couldn’t have worked out much better.

There’s a television mounted on a nearby wall that she’s been ignoring. It’s tuned to one of those all-day news channels, and when she hears the words “Lake Tahoe,” the broadcast suddenly catches her attention.

The anchor is explaining how cross-country skiers found two dead bodies in a hiking area near Lake Tahoe. The words “double homicide” are stamped along the bottom, as the screen shows footage of police cars at the snow-filled parking lot by Echo Lake.

They must not have found Logan’s body yet, she thinks. She’d been checking the Lake Tahoe Gazette website for the past few days and had seen that it had begun snowing the day after everything went down.